W. Watson wrote:

My question borders on suppose we are back 400 years ago and know almost
nothing about modern paddling techniques. Maybe I'm an indian (American)
on a river in the midwest. The tribe has noticed something about the way
water flows. Perhaps it's on a river the tribe has never seen before.
How do I turn that into a response while paddling?

Excuse the glib response, but you do it the same way those guys did,
many miles on the river.

Perhaps another way of thinking about this is to assume you are
blindfolded and paddling down the river, and you are with a companion.
He says, "Small eddy dead ahead." What do you do to prepare for it?

There's almost never an eddy dead ahead. Eddies are caused by
obstructions of one sort or another--rock, point, fallen tree, bank,
pourover--so that's what will be dead ahead. The way to prepare for an
eddy is to get a little speed up and paddle straight across the eddy
line, which means you have to be out away from the obstruction to get
the proper angle. Then heel the boat down current as you cross the
eddyline, which will probably be "upstream" from the point of view of a
guy on the bank. Failure to heel when needed is a major cause of wet
paddlers.

As another example, maybe more realistic, suppose you are given some
sort of waterflow map of a river that you have never been on. How do you
prepare for it, tactically or technique wise, without ever having been
on it and only knowing from the map of a written description what to
expect?

I've never seen a map such as you describe, but there are some
interesting graphics in the Masons' Path of the Paddle and Thrill of the
Paddle books that I think you would get a lot out of.

You don't have to be in a canoe to paractice this. Every time you're
close to moving water--river, creek, gutter, driveway--look closely at
how it moves and where the current accelerates, slows, and reverses.
Pretend you're in a 2" long boat and plot your course down the kerb to
the great Soo-Whur cataract.

I guess this gets down to how do you analyze water flow and your
reaction to it in order to navigate it?

Look where the most water is going and follow it. Let the current do as
much of the work as possible. Try to avoid waterfalls. Spend lots more
time in the boat.


--
Steve Cramer
Athens, GA